Tag Archives: Writing

It was the way she preferred to appear,
a streak through a magnetic photograph,
here and gone before you knew what had really happened.
She vibrated in that flash, before you could say hello,
between two thoughts, her mouth, if you were lucky,
a buzzing mist of kisses. She was in so many places at once,
you keep meeting her, traveling with time
like her favorite book in her pocket, going back into it.

She leaves you notes in side dimensions
just in case you forgot your keys one more time,
forgot why you entered the room, what you were looking for,
open the refrigerator with the opposite hand
and it is hanging there, a shopping list for gravity.

As if the sun was too slow to warm you,
as if there were too much time between now and now,
she was there so suddenly moments didn’t even have a chance,
before you could remember the world without her, sooner than light.

Before they knew he was dead–
his face in rags, perhaps a leper
mummified with plague–he stumbled
through the city, the artificial sky
burning in the air, acrid, pumped
by concrete antennas
glittering with business,
the greasy fog lying on the street,
crawling from the sewers.
They never looked twice,

thought, perhaps, his ancient stench
was from drinking too much water,
was, as the holomyths foretold
(they used to call them books?)
a beast soaking with wisdom, freewill.
You don’t talk to those, make eye contact,
share a GUI terminal, or (market forbid!)
an oxymask. When you breathe good painkillers,
everybody knows, especially Hive,
you wouldn’t want his stench of creativity
eating at your lungs. He stumbled with an air

of antiquity, a zombie in a swarm of drones,
losing all efficiency, staring up into the future
around him, knowing it would never really come–
the anachronism of the present constantly outdated
from overbearing upgrades. His own natural skin,
a sarcophagus. They hovered past in exoskeletons,
maglifted into the void of office sectors.

In a world of immortals, DNA-mapped,
nano-gridded blood, he moaned through alleys,
laughed at like a ghost, a fairy tale.
He refused to modify his body. They smirked
every time his heart beat. They chided him,
the children unplugged long enough to point,
for having a stomach, liver, they poked
at his disconnected spleen. A man, in this world,

is a waste of time, can’t get to work fast enough,
must eat and walk covered in rags
like a mock-up, vintage cartoon ape
smoking cigarettes and slapping his own head.

When he could see the sun, through the Lucid-glass
shelling the Company in campaign ads,
(he saw it once, in the future, but it was blurry,
burning his eyes) he promised himself,
the world, as he dragged his cracked-off arm
behind him like a fermented club,
he promised no more talk of ideas
or progress, vision, happiness, fulfillment,
philosophy. He would crawl back into the shadow
like a puppet. He would strip the gauze
from his scabbed eyes, and end the curse
of overlapping past/present time, and die.

For fuck’s sake, fold his plastic halo up
between his legs, he could finally die.

Money and I have an odd relationship. I never want to have to deal with it, but I’m always left needing more. I’ve never been great at handling my own money, and I’m always ever-so-willing to offer my art for free.

So something must be done. I’d be perfectly happy living the life of the impoverished artist if it wasn’t for the fact that living a comfortable life is a part of my happiness. It seems that, in my situation, the only way to not be concerned about money would be to have quite a lot of it.

But I could never see at as a virtuous thing just to have money. It is not an end-in-itself, not an ultimate goal. I do not look at people in a life of luxury and think “I wish I had that” and “I’m going to work as very-hard as I can to have that thing. Having things is boring. Every time I have a thing it immediately loses its luster. I am not into things, but I am into events.

Having events, or creating them, is costly. Sharing a dinner with a loved one, flying or driving long distances to see friends, even visiting the family, it all claws at the pockets. And maybe it’s my own fault. Maybe it’s fate, or bad luck, or some mechanic of the universe wrenching at my life thinking “once this thing is fixed, it’ll run like a dream.”

It doesn’t really matter. I have, on the whole, exactly what I want. Family, friends, positive and healthy relationships. I am, to be blunt, alive. Most of the time I don’t ask for much more than that. It is, after all, more than most of the human beings that have ever lived have. It keeps me happy.

But then there’s the crossroads, laying down in the middle of the clock with a gargantuan X. “What are you doing with your time.” Or, even more poignantly, “what have you changed in the world.” I want to change the world. Not in some grand, sweeping way. I’m not an open-to-the-public narcissist. I don’t even believe one person can change the world in any significant way (without support of the community).

A ripple. First an idea, it won’t go away. Then an action, with honesty, empathy, and virtue. Executed with humility. A butterfly effect of happiness. Smile at one person on the street, or two. Then they might smile at the bank teller, or say thank you in the perfect time of day to a worn-out cashier. Happiness is exponential.

But to be in the world costs money. Existential amounts of money.

I’ve had friends that have forgotten my name because I didn’t have enough gas to hang out any more. I’ve missed opportunities to experience and share art because I was trying to pull overtime and pay my utility bill.

It’s not a crisis. It’s just how it all starts catching up. Each bill falling one more piece of sand in the hourglass. I’m tired of deserts. I want rain. Not for greed. Not because I’m lazy. I’m just thirsty, I’ve been dancing as long as I can because in that dizzy moment I can sense something on the border of of perfection.

I’ll work hard for it. I’ll give you all I have. I know, in the end, all debts will be paid.

Here’s to life, and in it, freedom. May your Work and Fortune guide you through it.

You can’t step your toes into the rabbit hole. The wormhole chooses you, all or nothing. Enter the void and cross the veil, dive into it. It swallows you voraciously, you have no will, ego, consciousness left. The path of patterns break apart and you are left stranded. You must fall into it, merging into the mirror. All glimpses are illusion of material consciousness (shells breaking apart into linear time). Give it up (letgoletgo), surrender into the void. You will not recognize death until it swallows you. Mortality is your only gift, give it up. You need nothing. Living is bigger than you, space spirals into organic growth with root systems stretching their mathematical patterns beyond your realization. The master tunes into his will by bending reality into himself (bends himself to occupy being).

Glass trees, prismatic, nymphs dancing through shifting fractals, a network of coincidences collapsing into itself, in the grass blades, naked bodies moaning, convulsing, silent to the holographic worlds of the hermit stumbling drunkenly into the fool dancing to his hypnotic wisdom,the ignorance of innocence corrupted with discipline sinking into the cortex of my limbic system,channeling existence through the will of persistent imagination,cracking open patterns of automatic behavior and telepathic communication.

Another lazy day in the sun formulating the rotation of celestial bodies travelling through incessant determination. We are beautiful beings linked as the ego becomes aware of the preliminal systems, sharing an altered mindspace, intertwining ribcages of distorted, heart-racing empathy.

Can you see me with a broken antenna, spines bent in the storm, twist me until you receive the snowy signal? The feed is dim against the moonlight, your small chance to stare at the stars. The body warps until it feels itself floating in the transmission, can we find our way home on it, out of body and sinking into our own ways back. Your face shimmers into every person you’ve ever shown me. The storm bolts uprightin my bed, still trying to breathe underwater. What an insane fool I’ve been to believe myself for this long. I would apologize if it meant something. Sing to me and I’ll fall asleep, even if it means I’ll never see you again.

Travel through me like time,a desert landscape of moons rising over midnight wastelands,full of signs, correspondences, and hallucinations, coincidences and liquid interactions (alchemy, breathing the cancerous fumes of quicksilver and physics),

Out of gas and stranded, we still stumble into miracles in the kindness of strange people,head full of empty pockets of stories and a long road twisted into the future.

The siren song is finally deadly enough to listen to, lost on a ship, sailing into the fractured future. It unwinds time’s selfish clock. Waves of space wash into my face as we dance and we become an image of panoramic sunrise, virtually projecting itself onto the backs of our eyes like a hologram.

The green field tempts me, the light glimmering through the leaves onto supple, nubile bodies like an endless delusion, a prismatic charm of delight, hedonism, machinery. Enchanting lover, mesmerizing muse, serendipitous succubus, turn your whole inside out until i can sense you breaking free from the cage of your skin.

Your tongue burned a hole in my ribs the size of a key, your nimble fingers tumbling my chamber. Your mouth fills me with the sound of unlocking, bolt by bolt by bone I am opening. I am opening.

A drink in a sideshow carnival, a sex death wish, a list of inconsequential disasters. Fate emanates into kismet serendipity. Chaos answers to nothingness and order cracks open the flower of self to sink into nonsense. The pain is numbness and you can share with me, sedative, unconscious inconsistency, playing in the mirror against itself. The egg is a tomb of self-creation. We were born in death to live matter from the origin of motion.

I can feel my body casting shadows, the sun vibrating into my chest, shifting my heart into a cloudy web of laser beams. I am melting into the earth, curling up in her endless chambers, the cave of my mouth yawning into the sky, crumbling with dirt. My head is overflowing with birds diving into the blue green water of my hands, swimming into the waves. Space is expanding through me, stretching me, filling me with emptiness. Pour your kisses into me, tongue of light. Throw my shadows onto the ground, carry them into your bed until they sleep, burn them into gold, these elemental dreams.

If you need a crowbar to open your skull,
you probably weren’t yourself in the first place.
Sometimes it’s right to let a little light in. Your face
is a garden seeded with nail-flowers
and rosebush railroad spikes. The train
is pounding like a hammer with a mad god
dancing in the engine. There are roots in your palm
and an animal with a thousand changing faces
is eating from it slowly and staring up
at your new eye–its blasted visions
of dynamite–a metal taste in your mouth,
seafoam lips smooth as doll plastic,
the song of a revolver
screeching with needled records
grooved through your jaw, a purple smell
as you bend down to your knee, growing in place,
your head steeled with the blossom
of a blown-out dandelion, a new man.

He could feel the seeds growing under his skin like hard knobs of bark. His fingers mindlessly playing over the curves and points nested in his arms. On the back of his neck, protruding from the bulge of his seventh cervical vertebrae, edged ridges and grooves of a walnut hull pressed out from his spine. From there, a spiral of wooden grooves embossed his skin in a preternatural pattern. His arms bent into twigs, the trunk of his ribs ringed with age.

Every day, his chest formed a new circle, an expanding radial of mutated skin. His pores began to open with green sprouts. Tiny roots twined around his nerves, gripping them, wrapping themselves across his meridians. Buried deep inside him, something was coming alive.

He wondered, after the fire, if he was being possessed. He thought, as constant puffs of dandelions blew out from his fingertips, if it was the smoke of his own hand that choked her. It was too hot to see her face. It warped in the air with unforgiving heat.

His whole body trembled in a sticky sweat, sapped. His consciousness drug itself down into the abyss of an ocean with the unstoppable weight of anchors. He needed water. The storm in his head cracked with lightning, but never rained. His pupils dilated, drinking.

Every day he came to in the woods, a small clearing at noon. A cairn marked its center like a gravestone, a totem of faceless rocks balanced so precariously they seemed to be held together by still air. He was so thirsty. Digging always made him thirsty.

He carved triangles around the stones, an irrigation of mazes. He shoveled with the patience of a sundial, always leaning toward the sun, chewing its shadow. He had to keep digging. Somewhere in the memories, there had to be a reason.

His fingers shook as he tried to dial a number that no longer existed, the sharp watermelon seeds of his knuckles protruding into pinpricks. His head began to ring. He breathed the poison from the air, coughed up oxygen. He tried to breathe life back into her, watched the teary glaze of her eyes shudder, beginning to roll back.

Smoke filled her lungs, and then the house. He remembered the soot smeared on the roasted almond of her skin, the helpless streak of his thumb. The crackling house frame collapsed inward, chewed from the inside by the engulfing tongues of fire.

He felt her ashes below him, still with anticipation.

Rock by rock he covered himself, the cold weight pressing him farther into the ground. His roots tendriled into the earth, connecting him to each tree on the edge of the clearing. They would be one mind, a web of life, an interlocking pattern of growth exploding in the rivulets of God’s fingerprint.

He opened his throat, a wide gasp stuck in it, jarring his mouth toward the sky. He would eat the sun. He reached for it, digging his toes into the grit, bones splintering as he stretched through the space.

His face was covered in dirt, black and gritty, arms stuck up like two quivering aspens, the oldest organism. The white and black bark of his skin breathed with the sun. In the fall, tourists would come to see him, the trembling giant, the seeds of his eyes a matrix of raw potential, millennia old, bright orchids glowing in his palms. They quaked red and orange in the dry wind, leaving long trails of light in the dark like a lit cigarette.